In 1897/1898 Frobenius defined several "culture areas"
(Kulturkreise), cultures showing similar traits that have
been spread by diffusion or invasion. With his term
paideuma, Frobenius wanted to describe a gestalt, a manner of creating meaning
(Sinnstiftung), that was typical of certain economic
structures. Thus, the Frankfurt cultural morphologists tried to
reconstruct "the" world-view of hunters, early planters, and megalith-builders or sacred kings. This
concept of culture as a living organism was influenced by the
theories of Oswald Spengler.

Frobenius taught at the University of Frankfurt. In 1925, the
city acquired his collection of about 4700 prehistorical African
stone paintings, which are currently at the University's institute
of ethnology, which was named the Frobenius Institute in his honour
in 1946.

His writings with Douglas Fox were a channel through which some
African traditional storytelling and epic entered European
literature. This applies in particular to Gassire's
lute, an epic from West Africa which Frobenius had encountered
in Mali. Ezra Pound corresponded with Frobenius from
the 1920s, initially on economic topics. The story made its way
into Pound's Cantos through this connection.

In the 1930s, Frobenius claimed that he had found proof of the
existence of the lost continent of Atlantis.[1]

In 1910, Frobenius arrived in Ife after hearing of the “ancient”
city where supposedly “Atlantis” and the god or goddess of the sea
resided. The Ife culture lies in the western part of Nigeria and
had been the most important city of the Yorubas for centuries.
According to some estimation, the Ife culture existed long before
A.D. 800. There is no evidence on when the Ife art culture began.
However, it had been estimated with the help of radiocarbon dating
that fully developed artworks were being produced between the
eleventh and fifteenth century. As Hays (1959) observes, Frobenius
did not fit the regular image of an ethnologist and more often than
not was obsessed and “near paranoia”. Usually Frobenius made no
preliminary surveys of the sites or did not directly participate in
the excavation. According to Frobenius, he "called upon the [local]
people themselves to dig in those areas, where, according to
tradition, an ancestor god had descended into the depths of the
earth; they were to bring me everything that they found, since I
would buy even such things as broken potsherds lying around which
might seem meaningless to them. This suggestion brought
success."

Frobenius views about the excavating process and its outcome set
the stage for a determined deductionist maneuver by assuming
Africans non-commitment to artifacts, which “seem meaningless to
them.” Thus for six pounds and a bottle of scotch, as Frobenius
claimed, the bronze Ologun got into his possession because Africans
were not aesthetically matured, and had no sense of commitment to
their historical inheritance.

Due to his studies in African history,
Frobenius is a figure of renown in many African countries even
today. In particular, he influenced Léopold Sédar Senghor, one of the
founders of Négritude, who once claimed that Frobenius
had "given Africa back its dignity and identity." Aimé
Césaire also quoted Frobenius as praising African people as
being "civilized to the marrow of their bones", as opposed to the
degrading vision encouraged by colonial propaganda.

On the other hand, Wole Soyinka, in his 1986 Nobel Lecture,
criticized Frobenius for his "schizophrenic" view of Yoruba art
versus the people who made it.[2] Quoting
Frobenius's statement that "I was moved to silent melancholy at the
thought that this assembly of degenerate and feeble-minded
posterity should be the legitimate guardians of so much
loveliness,"[3] Soyinka
calls such sentiments "a direct invitation to a free-for-all race
for dispossession, justified on the grounds of the keeper's
unworthiness."[4]